Base register (BX). Used as a pointer to data (located in segment register DS, when in segmented mode).

Stack Pointer register (SP). Pointer to the top of the stack.

Stack Base Pointer register (BP). Used to point to the base of the stack.

Source Index register (SI). Used as a pointer to a source in stream operations.

Destination Index register (DI). Used as a pointer to a destination in stream operations.

The order in which they are listed here is for a reason: it is the same order that is used in a push-to-stack operation, which will be covered later.

All registers can be accessed in 16-bit and 32-bit modes. In 16-bit mode, the register is identified by its two-letter abbreviation from the list above. In 32-bit mode, this two-letter abbreviation is prefixed with an 'E' (extended). For example, 'EAX' is the accumulator register as a 32-bit value.

Similarly, in the 64-bit version, the 'E' is replaced with an 'R', so the 64-bit version of 'EAX' is called 'RAX'.

It is also possible to address the first four registers (AX, CX, DX and BX) in their size of 16-bit as two 8-bit halves. The least significant byte (LSB), or low half, is identified by replacing the 'X' with an 'L'. The most significant byte (MSB), or high half, uses an 'H' instead. For example, CL is the LSB of the counter register, whereas CH is its MSB.

In total, this gives us five ways to access the accumulator, counter, data and base registers: 64-bit, 32-bit, 16-bit, 8-bit LSB, and 8-bit MSB. The other four are accessed in only three ways: 64-bit, 32-bit and 16-bit. The following table summarises this:

G Segment (GS). Pointer to still more extra data ('G' comes after 'F').

Most applications on most modern operating systems (like FreeBSD, Linux or Microsoft Windows) use a memory model that points nearly all segment registers to the same place (and uses paging instead), effectively disabling their use. Typically the use of FS or GS is an exception to this rule, instead being used to point at thread-specific data.

The EFLAGS is a 32-bit register used as a collection of bits representing Boolean values to store the results of operations and the state of the processor.

The names of these bits are:

31

30

29

28

27

26

25

24

23

22

21

20

19

18

17

16

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

ID

VIP

VIF

AC

VM

RF

15

14

13

12

11

10

9

8

7

6

5

4

3

2

1

0

0

NT

IOPL

OF

DF

IF

TF

SF

ZF

0

AF

0

PF

1

CF

The bits named 0 and 1 are reserved bits and shouldn't be modified.

The different use of these flags are:

0.

CF : Carry Flag. Set if the last arithmetic operation carried (addition) or borrowed (subtraction) a bit beyond the size of the register. This is then checked when the operation is followed with an add-with-carry or subtract-with-borrow to deal with values too large for just one register to contain.

2.

PF : Parity Flag. Set if the number of set bits in the least significant byte is a multiple of 2.

64-bit x86 adds 8 more general-purpose registers, named R8, R9, R10 and so on up to R15. It also introduces a new naming convention that must be used for these new registers and can also be used for the old ones (except that AH, CH, DH and BH have no equivalents). In the new convention:

R0 is RAX.

R1 is RCX.

R2 is RDX.

R3 is RBX.

R4 is RSP.

R5 is RBP.

R6 is RSI.

R7 is RDI.

R8,R9,R10,R11,R12,R13,R14,R15 are the new registers and have no other names.

R0D~R15D are the lowermost 32 bits of each register. For example, R0D is EAX.

R0W~R15W are the lowermost 16 bits of each register. For example, R0W is AX.

R0L~R15L are the lowermost 8 bits of each register. For example, R0L is AL.

As well, 64-bit x86 includes SSE2, so each 64-bit x86 CPU has at least 8 registers (named XMM0~XMM7) that are 128 bits wide, but only accessible through SSE instructions. They cannot be used for quadruple-precision (128-bit) floating-point arithmetic, but they can each hold 2 double-precision or 4 single-precision floating-point values for a SIMD parallel instruction. They can also be operated on as 128-bit integers or vectors of shorter integers. If the processor supports AVX, as newer Intel and AMD desktop CPUs do, then each of these registers is actually the lower half of a 256-bit register (named YMM0~YMM7), the whole of which can be accessed with AVX instructions for further parallelization.

The stack is a Last In First Out (LIFO) data structure; data is pushed onto it and popped off of it in the reverse order.

movax,006Ahmovbx, F79Ah
movcx,1124hpushax

You push the value in AX onto the top of the stack, which now holds the value $006A.

pushbx

You do the same thing to the value in BX; the stack now has $006A and $F79A.

pushcx

Now the stack has $006A, $F79A, and $1124.

call do_stuff

Do some stuff. The function is not forced to save the registers it uses, hence us saving them.

popcx

Pop the last element pushed onto the stack into CX, $1124; the stack now has $006A and $F79A.

popbx

Pop the last element pushed onto the stack into BX, $F79A; the stack now has just $006A.

popax

Pop the last element pushed onto the stack into AX, $006A; the stack is empty.

The Stack is usually used to pass arguments to functions or procedures and also to keep track of control flow when the call instruction is used. The other common use of the Stack is temporarily saving registers.

Real Mode is a holdover from the original Intel 8086. You generally won't need to know anything about it (unless you are programming for a DOS-based system or, more likely, writing a boot loader that is directly called by the BIOS).

The Intel 8086 accessed memory using 20-bit addresses. But, as the processor itself was 16-bit, Intel invented an addressing scheme that provided a way of mapping a 20-bit addressing space into 16-bit words. Today's x86 processors start in the so-called Real Mode, which is an operating mode that mimics the behavior of the 8086, with some very tiny differences, for backwards compatibility.

In Real Mode, a segment and an offset register are used together to yield a final memory address. The value in the segment register is multiplied by 16 (shifted 4 bits to the left) and the offset is added to the result. This provides a usable address space of 1 MB. However, a quirk in the addressing scheme allows access past the 1 MB limit if a segment address of 0xFFFF (the highest possible) is used; on the 8086 and 8088, all accesses to this area wrapped around to the low end of memory, but on the 80286 and later, up to 65520 bytes past the 1 MB mark can be addressed this way if the A20 address line is enabled. See: The A20 Gate Saga.

One benefit shared by Real Mode segmentation and by Protected Mode Multi-Segment Memory Model is that all addresses must be given relative to another address (this is, the segment base address). A program can have its own address space and completely ignore the segment registers, and thus no pointers have to be relocated to run the program. Programs can perform near calls and jumps within the same segment, and data is always relative to segment base addresses (which in the Real Mode addressing scheme are computed from the values loaded in the Segment Registers).

This is what the DOS *.COM format does; the contents of the file are loaded into memory and blindly run. However, due to the fact that Real Mode segments are always 64 KB long, COM files could not be larger than that (in fact, they had to fit into 65280 bytes, since DOS used the first 256 of a segment for housekeeping data); for many years this wasn't a problem.

If programming in a modern operating system (such as Linux, Windows), you are basically programming in flat 32-bit mode. Any register can be used in addressing, and it is generally more efficient to use a full 32-bit register instead of a 16-bit register part. Additionally, segment registers are generally unused in flat mode, and it is generally a bad idea to touch them.

Using a 32-bit register to address memory the program can access (almost) all of the memory in a modern computer. For earlier processors (with only 16-bit registers) the segmented memory model was used. The 'CS', 'DS', and 'ES' registers are used to point to the different chunks of memory. For a small program (small model) the CS=DS=ES. For larger memory models, these 'segments' can point to different locations.